What Does My Research Mean?

As I have been working on my autoethnography for the past few weeks, my finds have produced interesting results.

My autoethnography topic is exploring the ramifications the COVID-19 pandemic has had on first generation students at Chapman. Unfortunately, due to how recent COVID-19 is, there are no published studies about the direct impact the quarantine has had on first-gen students yet. So to add to my autoethnography, I decided to use the internet research statistics and online articles relating to first-gen students as a whole and will tie it to what is currently happening. I also conducted interviews, both with Chapman first-gen students and a former classmate of mine who is a first-gen student at her university. I wanted to get the perspective of someone outside of Chapman to further highlight the unique challenges that are present for first-gen Chapman students.

When conducting my secondary research, I found it yielded similar answers to the primary research. My main source of secondary research came from an online Forbes article detailing issues that keep first generation college students from succeeding like their non-first-gen peers. The writer emphasized three main struggles, and I kept them in mind when conducting my interviews. I used these three struggles and catered them to my interview subjects in order to fill in gaps and make my findings specific to Chapman. My interviews further proved my existing opinion that first generation students are currently facing hard times due to the COVID-19 pandemic and gave me specific examples.

In looking at the responses from the interviews I conducted, I found there to be a strong overlap in the answers — especially in the responses of first-gen Chapman students. I found that they were all very frustrated with the current situation and found the quality of education through online Zoom classes difficult to adjust to and learn from. They also missed having easy access to resources on campus and felt that reaching out through email didn’t feel the same or produce the same effect. The only outlier I found was with my high school classmate, who felt that she was able to receive the same amount of help from her institution. This added complexity and showed that not all first-gen students are experiencing the same struggles.

In conclusion, I can draw from these results that COVID-19 has left a majority of Chapman first-gen students frustrated and struggling to make due with the situation.